Additional Information

Ugo Rondinone

Love Invents Us

Press Release

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Ugo Rondinone at 522 West 22nd Street. This is the artist's first one-person exhibition in the United States.

Ugo Rondinone is a 36-year-old Swiss artist who works in a wide variety of media. His exhibition, titled Love Invents Us, consists of three parts. The first room includes a new group of five large-scale photographs called Moonlighting. These are computer alterations of photographs appropriated from fetish magazines of black rubber clothes and objects.

The second room features a film installation called It's late, and the wind carries a faint sound… consisting of six black and white films simultaneously projected on all four walls. The films are slow motion loops of three men and three women doing various mundane tasks. The room is infused with soft blue light that glows through the ceiling, and accompanied by a soundtrack of music made by the artist that unifies the entire room into its own transcendental world.

In the third room the artist is showing three round "target" paintings measuring eight feet in diameter whose concentric circles of bright colors vibrate and create a hypnotic effect. Their blatantly decorative style is an ironic play on the tradition of abstract painting. Also in the third room is a "diary" consisting of 60 ink on paper text and image drawings.

Ugo Rondinone lives and works in Zurich and New York. He began exhibiting his work in 1985, and has had one-person exhibitions at the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva; Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; and the Kunstmuseum, Glarus. He currently has major installations on view in the Instanbul Biennial, at the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, and he will be included in the upcoming exhibition "Let's Entertain" at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Ugo Rondinone: Love Invents Us will be on view at the Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues) through April 5, 2000. Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 to 6:00pm.

For further information or photographs please contact Andrew Leslie at (212) 243-0200.